Administration of the oral live attenuated polio vaccine with Syrian children, which is no longer used in the U.S. and most other countries. Photo by UNICEF.

Health Impact News Editor

While Syria has been reportedly polio free since 1999, the discovery of 10 new cases of polio inside Syria has prompted UNICEF to begin vaccinating over 20 million Syrian children under the age of five with the live oral polio vaccine. The aggressive campaign also targets Syrian children outside of Syria in neighboring countries where numerous refugee camps exist.

As Al Jazeer is reporting, “We’re never going to know how exactly how it arrived in Syria.” Guesses are that it originated in Pakistan.

Unfortunately, what UNICEF reports and what gets republished in almost all mainstream media reports regarding the polio vaccine, fail to mention that this is the live oral polio vaccine, which actually sheds the virus, and that the vaccine is known to cause outbreaks of polio and paralysis. The fact that the oral polio vaccine contains “pathogenic vaccine-derived polioviruses” is very well documented in the scientific literature, but seldom, if ever, reported in the popular media. Children carrying around the live virus shed it, and it ends up in the sewage systems.

The live oral polio vaccine has not been used in the United States for over a decade, nor in most other parts of the world. The inactivated poliovirus vaccine is used instead. But this requires an injection, and it is much easier to administer a live oral polio vaccine (see photo above), particularly where mass vaccination is desired.

Mass vaccination is what is being implemented today among 20 million Syrian children refugees, as well as 500,000 Filipino children in areas affected by Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda in the Philippines. It is also widely used in poor rural areas in Africa and countries like Pakistan and India. In all of these areas, the live oral polio vaccine is used, in spite of the fact that it is known to cause polio and paralysis. Even the World Health Organization (WHO) admits this, although they claim the occurrence is “rare.” How “rare,” of course, is not stated.

Doctors and researchers who understand the dangers and risks of the oral polio vaccine (OPV) have been calling for an end to this terrible vaccine for years now. An editorial appeared in the Oxford Journals Clinical Infectious Diseases periodical in 2005 titled, “When Can We Stop Using Oral Poliovirus Vaccine?” It was written by Dr. Harry F. Hull of the Minnesota Department of Health, and Dr. Philip D. Minor of the Division of Virology, National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, in the United Kingdom. They requested that the oral polio vaccine be stopped:

Why must OPV vaccination be stopped? Vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis was recognized shortly after the introduction of OPV, with cases occurring in both vaccines and their contacts. The time is coming when the only cause of polio is likely to be the vaccine used to prevent it. Ample molecular data are now available to demonstrate that vaccine viruses can revert to full neurovirulence. Outbreaks of polio in China, Egypt, Haiti, Madagascar, and the Philippines caused by circulating, neurovirulent vaccine-derived polioviruses (VDPVs) demonstrate that these revertent strains are fully transmissible and pose significant population risks. (Source.)

OPV has lost its effectiveness in providing herd immunity. It seems that children are getting polio from OPV, and it also seems that OPV is proving to be ineffective in stopping polio transmission from another source. Therefore, the whole world—and especially developing countries—should shift from OPV to IPV. (Source.)

It is interesting to note that when Dr. Shahzad wrote this in 2009, he said: “According to the World Health Organization, routine immunization with OPV must cease after the eradication of poliovirus because of the danger of outbreaks of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus and the risk of VAPP.”

So why, here in 2013, is WHO and UNICEF still administering the dangerous oral polio vaccine, especially in countries like the Philippines where there has not been a single case of polio since 1993?

This year (2013), UNICEF has already purchased 1.35 billion doses of the oral polio vaccine, and they are using the polio outbreaks among the Syrian refugee children and the typhoon tragedy in the Philippines to increase that number to 1.7 billion doses by the end of this year. (Source.) That’s a very large windfall for the pharmaceutical companies! Could this be why they are so reluctant to stop producing this vaccine? The vaccine is administered free of charge, as taxpayers from countries supporting the United Nations fund the purchase of these vaccines (the United States is the largest supporter of the United Nations.)

These nearly 2 BILLION doses of the live oral polio vaccine are all targeted to children under the age of 5. In a report published in the Lancet (free registration required to read) in 2004, it was revealed that in the countries where UNICEF was working, deaths of children under the age of 5 actually increased! Is it a coincidence that this is the same age group UNICEF targets with their vaccine programs?

So, returning to the question of how did polio spread to these Syrian children, is it possible that oral polio vaccine itself caused it? Did UNICEF begin vaccinating Syrian children with the live oral polio vaccine before any cases of polio were reported?

Yes, they did. In November of 2012 through January of this year (2013), there was already a mass oral polio vaccine campaign underway targeting 2.5 million children under the age of 5, even though there had not be a single case of polio prior to 1999.